cheese it, the cops!

Getting out of this world alive versus being acclaimed as the absolute best at something/

I work to understand what values we can live by in a world as connected, chaotic, and potentially catastrophic as the present.                                                                                                                                                                       -- Avram Alpert

Alpert is one of those public intellectuals who manages to straddle the academic, publishing, and actually thinking about what he's thinking about. In some ways, his "work" as a lecturer and Fellow/Lecturer at The New Institute in Hamburg, a Fellow and Lecturer at Princeton and a Lecturer at Rutgers reminds me a bit of Crispin Sartwell. For me, Crispy seems to have the same underlying goal, striving to understand relevant values for this new way of living. Crispin has just chosen a more structured and traditional way of doing that work. Another way to look at it, of course, is that being a Fellow and Lecturer or being a professor of philosophy is their way of having a day job that's relevant to their work. Alpert's new book, The Good Enough Life strikes me as a direct way of doing his work while possibly working at a side gig, being a writer.  

One of my High School Teachers, a Diocesan priest who was nicknamed Charlie the Tuna because of an similarity to the protagonist in Starkist's advertising, presented us with a philosophical problem. He said that he was perfect. That got a laugh as well as starting a discussion. He asked if we didn't agree that only God was perfect. It was, after all, a Catholic high school -- and for sake of argument, we agreed. He then asked if we agreed that it was our duty to seek perfection in every way. Bit more complicated, but based on the Baltimore Catechism, we were conditioned to agree. He then asked if that didn't mean we were doomed because we could never achieve the goal of our duty, to seek perfection. Muttering in the crowd. Ok, if we had duty to seek what we could never achieve, how to resolve it? And, if only God is perfect, wasn't our solution to seek to be perfectly imperfect, and he figured that he nailed that one...so?

 

I have struggled with that particular dogleg for a long time now; as the greatest Country poet of the 20th Century put in his last musical release before he died, "No matter how we struggle and strive, we'll never get out of this world alive." I don't believe Hank Williams was advocating giving up; rather, I think he was suggesting that we recognize as he did that we were here for the struggle, not for the acclaim that comes with the being recognized as the greatest. As soon as we get recognized as that, we're going to fall, because somebody better would come along.

This new book, The Good-Enough Life by Avram Alpert presents a more complex yet simple solution. It should be enough for each of us to be recognized as the greatest something rather than seeking universal acclaim once, and then go on with our work in this life. As another country-music poet, Emmylou Harris, sang "I was born to run/to get ahead of the rest/and all that I wanted was to be best//To live free, and be someone/I was born to be fast, I was born to run."

 

Alpert credits another writer with the solution to this philosophical and ethical maze. " Michael Walzer’s influential notion of complex equality. Social life, Walzer says, divides itself into many different spheres: business, science, athletics and so forth. We want those spheres to be internally coherent, such that the most recognized athletes are the most athletically talented, the most successful businesspeople are the ones who offer the best products at the best prices, and the most celebrated scientists are those who are the most scientifically brilliant. Accordingly, the spheres should be externally sealed off from each other. Top athletes should not use their celebrity to make millions endorsing sub-par business products. Successful businesspeople should not use their wealth to sway scientific research agendas. Gifted scientists should not figure out how to dope athletes in technically legal ways."

 

Avram seems to admit that change might be a far reach, but still, if society as well as individuals accepted the "good enough" goal, we might be spared Charles Barkley hawking sandwiches and Doug Flutie supporting Frank Thomas in hyping a Testosterone product.

 

 

 

homo econonomicus: replaced by saints

For quite awhile now, the human being as portrayed in some traditional strands of economics has been embattled. This is the person who is motivated only by self-interest, and pursues that interest by and large rationally: that is, by means well-suited to achieve it. This picture, often associated with Adam Smith but perhaps more clearly endorsed by Thomas Hobbes, e..g., allows one to 'model' markets with things like game and decision theory. Many have found this picture of us both disgusting and non-empirical (evil and false, to put it plainly): one of my heroes, David Graeber, rails against it in a recent essay in the New York Review of Books, for example. But I would caution against just endorsing its opposite, a move that is understandable and perhaps even admirable, but which equally lands you in the realm of the obviously false, and makes perfectly nice professors into mere ideologues.

Paul Collier, an Oxford economics professor, takes 'economic man' to task yet again as he reviews a number of economic books in the Dec 6 Times Literary Supplement (Greed is Dead) (really? dead?), especially Nicholas Christakis's book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society:

The book concludes that "humans everywhere are pre-wired to make a particular kind of society - one full of love, friendship, cooperation, and learning." Christakis demonstrates how we have evolved to enjoy sociality and to be prosocial. Humans crave to belong to a group. We are prepared to forgo individual material rewards in pursuit of this. The prosociality comes from our genes...: being prosocial, we co-operate, forming habitats that promote further prosociality, and through this common group behaviour we have gradually changed the gene pool. Since we are all programmed with these genes, vast swathes of our behavior are common. This is why, as a species, we have been hard-wired for morality.

Let's leave aside a few things, such as the bristling unattractiveness and buzzwordy pseudo-scientificity of the prose, which has also proven to be a problem for the discipline as a whole. Also, let's leave aside the effortless identification of 'prosocial' with moral (many moral systems insist that you have to resist the group in various situations, e.g.). This just says that human nature is good, and tacks on an evolutionary explanation (one put forward, with data, by Peter Kropotkin in the late 19th century). And I allow that the claim that we are 'hard-wired' (x) for cooperation, or that cooperation is selected for, is entirely plausible; or I might have said, even obvious.

But just like the position it rejects, this one cannot explain a whole bunch of human behavior. Looking squarely at the human world right now, or indeed at any time: could it have emerged from a species that has evolved to, is gene-'programmed' to, make a society of 'love, friendship, and cooperation'? Not hardly, though it's sort of sweet if y'all believe that. I think, if you are doing science, you had better look at how people actually behave and then, if you insist, speculate on how these behaviors were selected for. Now, we are not greed machines and there is all sorts of cooperative activity everywhere. Also there is all kinds of killing, competition, exploitation, and so on. Looking at the thing squarely, we are obviously not entirely "prosocial" and not entirely "anti-social."

What the idea that human nature is super-good allows you to do is blame neo-liberalism or something for all the terrible ways we actually are. But however, if there is such a thing as neo-liberalism, it was itself created by human beings, no? Human beings that, for Collier and Christakis, were violating their own genes. Also, obviously human behavior has been a mixed bag of competition and cooperation throughout (and again, these do not at all track 'evil' and 'good'), and we must speculate that both are selected for, which is plausible

That we have evolved into pacifistic self-sacrificers and universal lovers is obviously, obviously, no more true than that we have evolved into individualistic greed machines. If the discipline of economics is just going to flow toward the opposite of what it once said, it is going to be no more empirical than it ever was. These positions are both political ideologies, and if the discipline can't give us anything but that, it should lapse into silence.

What May I Hope?

Gloss on the latest WSJ piece, on Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Psychological Association, in a contest for the very soul of America. The APA has already decisively won the contest for the very prose style of America, in which, for example, the passive voice in the long run will replace the active voice, as passive people will replace active people. Thinking of it as a direct inversion of the values of people such as Emerson and Thoreau sheds some light on the real project.

The DSM is a moral guide, or a moral theory, or a moral program. It addresses the questions "What sort of person should I be?" "How should I treat others?" "How should I behave?" "What shall I believe?" "For what may I hope?" Now in this regard it has some drawbacks. It flubs the fact/value distinction, for one thing. The authors do not seem to be aware that they are presenting a moral theory, or at any rate they definitely don't want their readers to be aware of that. It is a bewildering nest of inadequately theorized concepts, hardly even put in relation to one another.

If Emerson attracted and inspired readers with the intensity and beauty of his writing and ideas, the APAs disseminates its values largely as a matter of institutional enforcement. Where Emerson wanted to set your mind alight, the APA wants to set it right, chemically. I wonder what percentage of people who end up consulting psychologists are effectively being required to do so. Emerson was taking only volunteers.

Replacing virtue and vice with health and illness is a merely verbal shift; the concepts perform quite the same task and are intended to shape each and all of us. And coming down to it, I'm afraid the moral prescription is literal: hope for pills.

And deep in Miller's Cave...

Dark old cave, Miller's Cave...

Way down in the state of Georgia/ among the swamps and everglades / there's a big hole in Tiger Mountain/ God help the man who gets lost in Miller's Cave...

Sometimes I think that Wolf Country should relocate to Miller's Cave...

"Of course, our grotesquerie of a president decided that it was horrible that these disasters keep piling up, stoked by a combination of overheated rhetoric, totally unhinged and evil behavior, and perhaps the full moon were detracting from his many accomplishments like…crashing the stock market? Threatening the Federal Reserve, supposedly telling the Chairman not to raise rates or he would get even; then, ok-ing the largest bond action to get over the known monster deficit his beloved tax disaster — err, law — shot in the Federal coffers." 

https://www.veteransnewsreport.com/2018/11/02/dispatches-from-wolf-country-memento-mori/

Damn Socrates, Wittgenstein, Authenticity and Your Own Bullshit

Farrell's Guide to Authenticity. Don't believe your own bullshit. Laugh at it...

 

The sense of the world must lie outside the world...What we cannot speak about we must remain silent about...What can be described can happen too, and what is excluded by the laws of causality cannot be described -- Wittgenstein

A good guide will take through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide. -- Wittgenstein

There's a great article about Wittgenstein and the problems of authenticity in The NY Times Series The Stone this morning. It got me thinking.

Damned authenticity! It roughly means, for me, the 1=1 congruence of thought, action, belief, speech, dreams and prayers. It's bloody near impossible, because nothing is really congruent. As a born, baptized, educated and apostate Roman Catholic, it is similar to things like being in a state of grace or "making a good act of contrition." If I confess the sin of anger -- a sin I'm really, really proficient at -- to make a good act of contrition requires that I be sorry for what I did, and that I intend unreservedly to never be angry again. Yeah, right...not happening, Brother Jesus, not happening.

Damned Wittgenstein, for that matter. His philosophy is so dense because he sought absolute congruence between thought, action, and belief. But one thing the universe is, and remains, is not congruent. Trying to understand it can make multiple very bright people flee to things like cultivating a rock garden, as my buddy, indicted coconspirator and practicing Philosopher as well as Philosophy Professor Crispin Sartwell has done. Or, run for Congress. Or, run to prayer.

Confession, authenticity, congruence, integrity...Damn them all, I say. And, I recommend than taking a deep breath and getting back to trying to figure it all out. It's not the job of the academic philosopher to do this; it's the job of the authentic human being.

"But one thing we can understand about Wittgenstein is that he longed to change himself; and he saw confession as a means to fulfilling this. “Nothing is so difficult,” Wittgenstein wrote in 1938, “as not deceiving oneself.”’ His vision of the authentic self is perhaps always beyond reach, like the exemplars of authenticity with which he was familiar through the writings of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Authenticity throughout the history of philosophy is often conceived of as an ideal to which we should aspire, but that doesn’t prevent it being a useful means for self-improvement. Confession can help remove obstacles standing in the way of our becoming our authentic selves. "If it can do that for Wittgenstein, it may do the same for us."

Or, maybe not. 

Maybe you should just not think about it all. This one is for Crispin, Jeff, James, Agi and Adam...

 

necessity and spontaneity: entanglements 7

 

 

Trump tripping over Umberto Eco in The Guardian

I always found time to struggle through Umberto Eco's stuff, even though it was a hard day at the literary coal face. Most literary philosophers are like that, of course; Foucault's Pendulum really made my eyes ache, and as Wiki points out, Anthony Burgess said that it had so many arcane references and allusions that to get all the jokes, you needed an index. Or, a crib sheet. Cliff notes. A tutor...

But, it was always worth the work. Even if you weren't so sure as to what actually went on and how it happened, it was one helluva ride. So, it was nice to be reminded of that this morning when going through The Guardian I found this:

The great philosopher-novelist Umberto Eco once declared that we will always come up against “the hard core of Being” and the “lines of resistance” that tell us when we are talking rubbish, or acting nonsensically. There was a time when I wondered bleakly if Donald Trump may be exempt from this philosophical precept.

British political reporter and Guardian Journalist Matthew d'Ancona rattles more than a few chains in Trump's attic and cages in his basement. Muslim Exclusion Act is one part of Being's hard core; the AHCA versus ACA is another; and the whole NATO kerfuffle is another. At some point, the whole house of Cheese will just melt into the Dumpster Fire of his ID and his lackeys' ideological venom and self-dealing desires.

In business, I refer to it as having a great idea trip over a relevant fact. Stainless steel pipe is really spiffy, except when you're using it to handle salt water where it will eat through the metal and leak catastrophically faster than cancer through a colon. You can't get jet fuel out of peanut butter no matter how hard you try. You really can't roller skate in a buffalo herd. 

 

And, being President of a complex and multi-layered tripartite government is not the same as being the sole proprietor of a privately held firm. Nobody really has to listen to what you want in government; it's all fungible. You don't really have any privacy or the ability to just phone it in; when you do, something happens. When you get it wrong, people will notice. Smart people, with long memories, and not all that interested in trusting a con artist, poseur and hype-artist. People way smarter than you who remember insults and slights just as malevolently as you do, but wait for the proper time to get even. How much might  Lindsay Graham or  Ted Cruz enjoy casting the vote that impeaches his President and casts him out into darkness? 

D'Ancona finishes like this, no time for parades and an auto da fe' of Breitbart, Ivanka's lingerie line and The Art of the Deal. At least, not yet. But the time is coming...if you keep smashing into Being's hard core by tripping over facts including "You're not the boss of me and you're not so big" you may be forced to drag you orange ass back to that Florida swamp and hand out timeshares. 

To change the metaphor: the waves of Trump’s sociopathic belief that he can say and do what he likes with impunity are starting to hit the rocks of reality. There is nothing to celebrate yet, no cause to relax, no outcome assured. Let us just say that this may, conceivably, be the end of the beginning.

Amen, brother. Amen.

 

Why Nazi punching might be good for the soul

Why we should consider Nazi punching but only when they are doing Nazi things...like flashing White Power Gang Signs on Meet the Press with gratuitous Crispin Nazi Punching shout out, Pastor Niemoller axion, description of hate crimes as data points, kind of...and Camper Von Beethoven. Who doesn't love some Camper? 

 

 

vote 3rd party in the actual world

one pretty fundamental - yet extremely problematic - form of moral reasoning that people will use to corner you into the hillary/donnie dichotomy. alright you're going to vote for stein (johnson). what if everyone thought like that? then trump (clinton) will win! in other words, you're not only responsible for your own vote in the real world, which has almost no effect, but for other people's hypothetical votes in a possible world. 

of course, if everyone thought like me, everyone would be voting for something much closer to their convictions and the political system would pop open like a carnivorous plant, so let's not worry about that. but what is the argument? that i might be persuasive to people? well, that is not a result of my vote per se. that 12.3% of voters are watching over my shoulder as i vote and will imitate me? 

in general (i am talking to you, immanuel kant), i think we would do better to think about the actual principle of our own actions and the actual effects of our actual actions in the actual world. being responsible for that is more than enough, and the only thing that has you reasoning about reality. i would try to show how such an approach would not necessarily be sheer individualism or environmentally disastrous, etc. but whether i can or not, you had better have an argument handy that i should be responsible for the non-actual effects of my action in a non-actual world.

 

woolman, singer, and reparations

i'm gearing up to teach the writings of the amazing quaker saint john woolman, who in the mid-1700s was arguing for indian rights and the immediate abolition of slavery, and traveling around trying to convince masters to free their slaves, etc. in his rather remarkable essay "a plea for the poor", he argues as clearly as can be for peter singer's 'effective altruism': the idea that we have a moral obligation to devote most of our resources above subsistence to helping those in need. really, quite the same argument as singer.

more surprising, perhaps, is that in 1763, for god's sake, he's arguing straight up for reparations to the descendants of slaves, and calculating what they should be.

Having thus far spoken of the Negroes as equally entitled to the benefit of their labour with us, I feel it on my mind to mention that debt which is due to many Negroes of the present age. Where men within certain limits are so formed into a society as to become like a large body consisting of many members, here whatever injuries are done to others not of this society by members of this society, if the society in whose power it is doth not use all reasonable endeavours to execute justice and judgment, nor publicly disown those unrighteous proceedings, the iniquities of individuals become chargeable on such civil society to which they remain united. And where persons have been injured as to their outward substance and died without having recompense, so that their children are kept out of that which was equitably due to their parents, here such children appear to be justly entitled to receive recompense from that civil society under which their parents suffered. . . .

Suppose an inoffensive youth, forty years ago, was violently taken from Guinea, sold here as a slave, laboured hard till old age, and hath children who are now living. Though no sum of money may properly be mentioned as an equal regard for the total deprivation of liberty, yet if the sufferings of this man be computed at no more than fifty pounds, I expect candid men will suppose it within bounds, and that his children have an equitable right to it. Fifty pounds at three percent, adding the interest to the principal once in ten years appears in forty years to make upwards of one hundred and forty pounds.

i wonder whether anyone else was making arguments like that in the 18th century.

Excellent piece there, Crispy --

Crispin has a great piece as a part of The Stone series on the NY Times today. As a friend, occasional co-conspirator and one-time Vice Presidential Candidate for the Defeatists!, I;m really happy for him and recommend the article enthusiastically.

I sense that like me, Crispin has been taking a vacation from giving a damn about US presidential politics, but occasionally feels pulled back into it. Certainly, in the progression of American culture, presidential politics, choices and elections have been used to make transitions. Kennedy replaced tired, worn out old Eisenhower with vigah! and such -- in reality, drugged to the gills for back pain, suffering from Addisons and various iterations of venereal disease. Ronald Reagan was going to reform everything after the weakness of Jimmy Carter and then should have been impeached for the Iran Contra deal. And so on -- Barrack Obama was supposed to mark out transition to being a post racial nation, and since then we have gotten to continually play out our dark night of the soul in communities all over the country. 

Crispin's more populist work, like cheese it, tend toward an ironic approach which was my first reason for reading his stuff. This piece, which comes at least in part from his piece on the Philosophy of Edgar Allan Poe, contains more than a little of it. Basically, one could contend that Crispin examines the idea of human self-improvement as moral and ethical and compassionate human beings. 

It's safe to say he approves that outcome, he just doesn't think it's very likely. I suspect most of us will probably agree, at least in part. As I tell the conspiracy freaks who normally read my stuff, if I'm looking for a reason why somebody did something stupid, I opt first for stupidity and then for the seven deadly sins. Dr, King was hopefully correct about the arc of human history being toward justice, but I'd hedge those bets with one's on sloth, gluttony, greed, lust, hatred, anger and pride.

By the way, today is Van Morrison's birthday. 

 

forced choices

people act like they are literally forced to vote for, say hillary clinton. when push comes to shove, are you going to vote for hillary or jeb? lesser of two evils, etc. no one else can win.  but in this and in some other cases, you really are voting for exactly what purport most to repudiate, for exactly the hierarchy you say is the problem, with a slightly different rhetorical patina that somehow engages your social identity, though with no sincerity.

another thing that's supposedly forced in this system is that candidates - and again hillary is and will be an extremely clear case - have to, really have to, float with the polls, or the polling of the party base in the primary process. i am telling you, none of this is forced at all. or: hillary has no choice but to raise billions; she needs to do whatever she needs to do to accomplish that. people who suddenly found gay marriage when it hit 52% in the polls - oh, barack and hillary, for example - will then pay tribute to the memory of martin luther king, an example of moral courage for us all, etc. but you did not have to be a king to endorse gay marriage in 2008, you just had to not be a complete moral coward. they're ready to march over the edmund pettus bridge now that there's absolutely no risk involved. back then, they'd have been telling you that king was too extreme. they try to put passion in their voices so as to inspire you with the fierce urgency of let me focus-group that.

i think people want to feel forced in order not to make even a mildly hard decision. voting third party is not an excruciating choice with terrifying consequences. really it's not. it obviously is not if you live in a state that is clearly going one way or the other, which is most states. and of course it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that just makes it impossible to effect any significant change through the electoral process at all: it makes democracy nothing, really. and then, the idea that obviously a candidate can't possibly honestly represent their real beliefs places extraordinarily low moral standards on politicians. no, guess what: they can say whatever they like. i think in some cases they might be surprised by a good response to that. but if not, then the worst that happens is you lose the election. that is not an unfaceable personal calamity. it's not like a choice where you're picking who has to die or something. anyone can decide to do that anytime they like, and i hope that you expect better than that from any neighbor, colleague, spouse, etc.

also don't let anyone tell you that a vote for a third party is a vote for the republican (or the democrat). i really did prove that false mathematically long ago. and any way you look at it, a vote for, say, bernie sanders in the democratic primary cannot be a 'wasted vote' any more than a vote for hillary clinton, no matter who wins. indeed, if she's going to win no matter who you vote for, a vote for her is certainly wasted. and really, if you vote for a person whose real positions or whose persona you don't believe or believe in, or in the worst case whose positions or persona you on reflection repudiate, you are certainly wasting your vote.

 

Billy Yank and Johnny Reb hit Starbucks circa 1863

The news that the United Auto Workers lost a union election at a Nashville VW plant has sent the labor movement into something of a what the hell just happened spin. Unfortunately, I think that the results were preordained, back in about 1863. We have an interesting history in this country of well meaning northerners going into the backward and dirty south to enlighten these poor sons and daughters of Dixie, and it just doesn't work because the Northerners aren't trusted and the track record hasn't been all that great.

Hell, the post-union industrialization of the South wasn't by VW but it was by Northern Manufacturers who realized that they could make a lot more money moving steel from Pittsburgh to Birmingham and screw the workers in Birmingham a lot less than they were being screwed by their own boss class, but screw them a lot more than they were screwing over their own workers in the North. One might write an interesting history of American Expansion and Exception as a race to exploit the more easily exploited at cost to the somewhat less exploited. Now, the industrialization of the South screwed over a lot of people, and the big companies took the blame; it was possible to find Southern bosses and they did. Reconstruction ultimately turned out OK for the Southerners although not ideal from their point of view; hence the 100 year affiliation to the Democratic party although not necessarily the party of Roosevelt and Johnson but something else entirely.

 

King Harvest (Has Surely Come)

Corn in the fields.
Listen to the rice when the wind blows 'cross the water,
King Harvest has surely come
I work for the union 'cause she's so good to me;
And I'm bound to come out on top,
That's where she said I should be
I will hear every word the boss may say,
For he's the one who hands me down my pay
Looks like this time I'm gonna get to stay,
I'm a union man, now, all the way
The smell of the leaves,
From the magnolia trees in the meadow,
King Harvest has surely come -- Robbie Robertson, the Band

Billy Yank and Johnny Reb compare resumes There's a wonderful moment in Gettysburg when an Officer of the 2oth Maine is talking with some Southern prisoners, primarily with a private. It's pretty interesting in that I think it's incredibly real and captures something that we miss at times. They ask each other where they're from, and the Rebel says, "Tennessee. How about you?" The Yank says, "Maine. I've never been to Tennessee." The Reb says, "Don't reckon I've ever been to Tennesse either."

I despise Upworthy, don't you...cue Emily Dickinson

 

I really don't like that bloody thing. Upworthy -- what the hell does it even mean? It's kind like RL Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verse which some people find poetic but I always found it to be saccharine, maudlin "why the hell did they give me this instead of the book about Vikings I wanted" even when I was a kid. But, in the words of the old Russian proverb, Даже слепая свинья находит желудь иногда, or as we say in Dusquesne, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH THIS SCREWY INTERFACE?

Ok, it's ok now. Actually, it translates like this...

Charlie: You're getting on. You're pushing 30. You know, it's time to think about getting some ambition. 
Terry: I always figured I'd live a bit longer without it. -- 

 

 

Anyway, there is also music provided by that twanging philosopher, Mr. Dwight Yoakum. But, watch the Ted Thing and I know you'll like it

And if you're taking a course in Aesthetics and Politics with Herr Professor Doktor Sartwell, compare and contrast values based on this contrasting versions of the Clash piece by Mr. Yoakum and Ms. McColl with extra credit if you can describe the similarity in the personal sitations of Ms. McColl and Mr. Strummer in 2012. Guaranteed C-, I tell you. Trust me. I used to be in govenment...

 

WTF....Seriously, WTF was wrong with these people...

In which Crusader AXE bitches about the events, all preceeding the Wikileaks disclosures to Julian Assange, in Bradley Manning's case and echoes Joseph Welch, Attorney for the US Army who asked Joe McCarthy "Do you have no shame, sir!" and bets even money on a sentence of ten years or less. 

 

It hurts my head when Fox News is in the right on a matter of principle

In which Crusader AXE mutters into his amontrillado about Harry Frankfurt, bullshit, talking points, the relationship between Roland Hedley and Winston Churchill and whether or not Jay Kearny now showers after or before or during each press conference....hands and soul never get clean. Oh, and involves Montaigne, Rolling Stone b-sides and Bob Dylan...with Popeye. 

Battle of what, exactly?

Certainly not of ideas, unless we're focusing on really bad ideas...in which Crusader AXE ponders the nature of treason implied by Republican antics in the House over the credit limits and uses Hank Williams as Luke the Drifter to foretell the future.

 

With discipline, tire valve stem caps are possible...

In which Crusader AXE says nice things about a General he knows in order to provide advice for living to youth who should ignore it and post some irrelevant or maynot so irrelevnat music from Allison Krausw channeling Blind Faith and Stevie Winwood being himself.

Neither Crusader AXE, nor Crispy, nor Allison Krause nor Stevie Winwood

ethics and evolution

one thing that is typical of our scientistic moment, as in the late nineteenth century, is the idea that we can derive morality or moral values from evolution. now, i am afraid not, and i will briefly state the overwhelming problems.

(1) the classical is/ought problem: evolution cannot account for normative force or moral claims. so let's say it was counter-evolutionary to take your stuff. is that a reason not to take your stuff? you might have many good arguments that it's wrong to take your stuff, but the idea that i am swimming against the tide of evolution might be met with a mere shrug. what if it turned out that some forms of violence or crime were adaptive? would that show that they were right? also evolution makes use of counter-adaptive behavior as much as adaptive behavior. acting counter-adaptationally is necessary to the progress of the species, and i and my offspring will pay the price if in fact i am so acting. 

(2) the basic inference has to be from actuality to etiology: arguments from evolution start by presuming that we are what evolution made us. so look: staring squarely at the data, we ought to speculate that both what we would think of as good behavior and bad have been selected for, insofar as we so stubbornly display both. insofar as evolution has selected us, it has, obvioously, selected both cooperation and competition, good and evil, happiness and pain, and so on. it appears, like the rest of nature, to be morally indifferent. if it was really selecting against theft or individualist philosophy or something it should have done better than it has so far in weeding out thieves and individualists.

in short if you want ethics without god you are going to have to find it elsewhere.

Faded love and National Security?

 

In which Crusader AXE muses about the CIA, Roman Triumphs, the Afghan conflict, hubris, schadenfreude, adultery, marriage, hypocrisy and teen age crushes by middle aged men viewed at least tangentally through classic honky tonk music because, that's what I do...

Like Dublin on his tower, watching his world collapse...or not

In which Crusader AXE responds to Crispins' couer de crie aboout factions, confounds Louis MacNeice with theology and Ana Marie Cox with a homeless guy in Dublin, and addresses what the hell it's all about Alfie anyway, revealing that Crispin Sartwell is really Mitt Romney's illegitimate teenage lovechild due to Mormon baptism of some shit....

Unscrupled and unlearned and Rubes

In which Crusader AXE corrals Moses, Mohammed, Newt Gingrich and Jeff Imelt's predecessor and drags them over to Crispin's place for a game of Texas Hold'Em dealt by William of Occam.

what if everyone did that?

one thing i'm puzzled about: the ethical stance, associated with the left at the moment, where the question is 'what if everyone did that?' what if no one recycled? what if everyone had five kids or drove a car that got 20 mpg? sometimes i share the intuition. sometimes i doubt the effects would be as described. you can get some pretty draconian stuff out of this, like it makes an argument that everyone should live urban, for example, which reduces your carbon footprint but might tend to delete in important respects everyone's relations to non-human nature, with incalculable long-range effects. in some ways it's a sort of an extension of the golden rule or the categorical imperative: live as you could want everyone to live. it sounds sensible.

on the other hand it sounds crazy. what if everyone was a philosophy professor? imagine the social costs! what if no one read novels? the publishing industry would collapse! what if everyone raised tomatoes? too many tomatoes! what if, at 3pm, everyone in the whole world stopped what they were doing and watched general hospital? it would be incumbent on someone who was trying to tease this into an ethical theory to distinguish cases where one ought to from cases where one needn't or ought not calculate the effects of everyone doing 'that'; possibly some thinkers have had a go.

now, when i choose to live rural, should i ask myself what would happen if everyone lived rural? why, exactly, when it's so obvious that not everyone will? many of my own beliefs and even actions are, i admit, taken precisely because in fact most people don't do 'that.' so how would we work in that sort of impulse? now, i guess it's ok until you get the point of using it as a taser: like, requiring people to live as would be best if everyone lived like that (note, with the effects anticipated this week by experts or faddists or scientists or or bureaucrats or whatever).

i do think it's kind of an interesting way to generate ethical intuitions: something you should ask yourself. however, when you get right down to it, i am not going to take responsibility for a kind of sci-fi hypothetical counter-factual scenario. i have enough trouble trying to take responsibility plainly for what i actually do and the effects what i actually do has on what actually happens (including what happens to other people, of course).

the intuition engine turns us into a vague collective cloud, but not even that: it asks you to operate morally in a world that does not or cannot exist, and as a person who cannot exist: a general person. honestly, whatever the truth about climate change, i'm only taking responsibility for my own emissions, which are infinitesimal. but then again, is it even possible for me to take responsibility for my own emissions? like with offsets or something?) probably i am not even paying the costs of my own emissions, and then how could we, or could we, hold individuals responsible in cases like this at all? but what if everyone thought like that?

in some ways the thought-experiement makes everyone responsible for what we do to the world, which sounds good. be the change you want to see etc. but on the other hand, living generally like this might be a way of evading the real effects of what you actually do: what if everyone tried to require everyone else to live as they thought everyone ought to live? possibly a war of each against each.

one thing to note: utilitarianism famously faces the problem that it insists that you judge the moral quality of an action by its effects, but the effects of any given action are very difficult or indeed impossible to foresee. now bloat up this standard to a possible (?) world in which 7 billion people act or believe like you do and try calculating the effects. 

but ask yourself this: what would the world be like if everyone lived the same way, had the same values, anticipated the same effects, and so on? maybe we'd merge ecstatically into a very big single thing. we'd be boring until we went extinct, though, which would not take long. so in application to itself, the principle is wacky, or self-consuming. strange, though, but the question also seems unavoidable and important. obviously, i am hostile a bit, because the thing would mess up my indivisualism etc. i started out tio slam but ended up worried.

Two of Crispin's favorite Renaissance thinkers collide...kinda, sorta, maybe

Highjacking Crispin's site again with JJ Cale and Chuck Prophet, Thomas More and Thomas Hobbes, the Navajo, the Army, Paul Ryan and Tora Bora...it just doesn't get better than this. I think at times there's a better class of reader here than at the other places I babble...certainly the comments I get over at Veteran's Today give me a lot of pause. Anyway, this has been a complex piece to get my teeth into...for a variety of reasons. So, here we go...

Civilized costs more than hard, brutish and short...

The number of broken promises and bad judgments made over the last 30 years is incredible. Each bad judgment ends up causing more broken promises. However, the majority of the problems I see – crumbling infrastructure, lousy schools, increased long-term unemployment, mounting debt, lagging modernization, lack of a coherent energy plan and so on and on and on  as well as what has happened to Native Americans, Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsman, Civil Servants, Labor Unions, and on and on comes from the idea that we don’t have the wherewithal to pay for what we need to do. That is bullshit. 

To be educated, a person doesn't have to know much or be informed, but he or she does have to have been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged human life.
Thomas More

 

 

Can you say AN/PDR-27R?  ALPHA-NOVEMBER-PAPA-DELTA-ROMEO-TWO-SEVEN-ROMEO?

Thugs and changing times without change in people

I've been quiet even though there have been a lot of things I've wanted to chime in on. However, the murder of Trayvon Martin has provoked a response. When exactly did behavior by self-appointed guardians of the people as lousy as the B-Specials in Ulster in 1968, the Klan in 1954, or the Security Forces in South Africa become legal in Florida? Self-defense is a universal defense if there actually is a threat...a black teen armed with skittles doesn't cut it as a defense for murder or Manslaughter 1. Florida is now less civilized than South Africa -- hell, the stats would probably bear us out on this. Sad -- we're less a civil society than we were in 1980...but then, why does that surprise me?

Slante' friends, we need it. 

Because Garage Door Openers are worth dying for...

One of the things that binds Crispin and me and my loose collective of malcontented malevolent dissidents, anarchists and engineers is our general aversion to the impact of the totalitarian mind on life, language and discourse. Particularly when afraid -- when they're afraid, they come unglued with weird explanations of events...Orwell could have had fun with that realization because it is when under pressure from the unknown that the basic spiritual bankruptcy and ontological void that is the totalitarian way becomes most obvious. Case in point, China.

Now, China has the potential to explode at any time. It's fairly obvious to anyone with a basic knowledge of Marxist thought that the victory of the Communist Party in 1948 preceded the rise of the industrial proletariat. Pretty much the way that Communism has spread everywhere, by the way, except for the countries in eastern Europe that were conquered by the Soviet Union. So, since the Party still rules the country as a vicious oligarchy, it should not be surprising that the government is terrified of anything that might blow it all up. Tibet, Western China, displaced living lives of misery in Guangzhou and Shanghai...labor unrest, the incredible imbalance between rich and middle class and middle class and poor...disease, famine, water impossible to drink, etc. etc. The place is an economic dynamo sputtering away on top of a volcano. 

Which presents a fair amount of hilarity masquerading as WTF? Not unlike Rush Limbaugh confusing contraception with the adult film industry and Israeli fellow-travellers eagerly sounding the drums for a war with Iran because our last religio-WMD-"Make the world safe"-enterprises have gone so well, the Chinese government is definitely after the root cause of problems at all levels. Jezebel picked up a story from The People's Daily that really makes it obvious that fantastic explanations for things is not just a Republican plutocratic art but one shared by totalitarians univerally. 

Ok, girl one loses a "remote control" to a rolling door for her home. Girl one is obviously fairly rich for China since this looks like a really bad translation of "Garage Door Opener..." although I suppose it could have been a rolling steel shutter door to a patio or perhaps a French Door with a remote to the patio but, WHAT THE HELL?  The silly damn Khardasians don't have remote controlled French doors; Trump doesn't have remote controlled French doors. That makes no sense...even in China, which at some levels, times and places is really like Batman's Gotham City, on meth...So, the kid lost a garage door opener. She decides to kill herself, so she hides in a closet -- another sign that we're dealing with some level of wealth here, there's actually a closet that is not so much in use that hiding in it is possible -- until her little friend comes over. She says she's going to commit suicide, the little friend says, OK, me too and Girl 1 writes down a note saying that she's killing herself over the garage door opener and Girl 2 is doing it because, well, they're friends and it's Tuesday and there's nothing on TV and...they are planning on visiting the Qing dynansty to make a movie of the emperor -- any emperor -- and then going to outer space. Girl 1 tells her sister to "Take Care of the Parents" because it's all about the parents, and they jump in a pool and drown. 

Sister? The Chinese still have their one child rule. Only the very well to do and party elites get to have multiple children. WHAT THE HELL? This passes no reality test...but, the inspiration for the suicide is ...TV shows about people travelling in time and marrying royalty. 

Yeah, and comic books caused juvenile delinquency and rock and roll and teenage pregnancy and communism. Ask your great, great senile grandmother!

Imagine the dialogue in the TV movie...if you've ever listened to the dialogue in a Chinese TV show, as I did by reading subtitles while there -- you'll recognize it. 

Chechette: I lost the garage door remote and have brought dishonor on myself and my family. I must kill myself! 

Chongette: I am your best friend. I will also kill myself. 

Cheechette:Well, if we kill ourselves, we can go back in time and make a movie of the emperor in the Qing dynasty!

Chongette:Oh, good. Then we can travel in space.

 

Cheechette: My parents will be so proud...let's go drown ourselves in the pool!

Both: All hail the Glorious People's Liberation Army and Chairman Mao!"

Yeah. Now, they could have blamed this on Falung Gong because everybody knows that weird calestenics and such make you crazy. They could have blamed this on the influences of capitalism. They could have blamed it on a lot of things. Hell, blame it on Guy Clark ...Time travel on the Chinese equivalent to The Gilmore Girls? Jezebel has an excellent point, by the way.  

This sounds like a cautionary tale about parenting — if your kid thinks killing herself is a good response to losing the remote control, you might not be sending the right message about the value of everyday objects. But Sun Yunxiao, deputy director of China Youth and Children Research Center, has a different moral in mind:

Schoolchildren are rich in curiosity but poor in judgment, so this kind of tragedy happens in every era. I have heard of children jumping from high buildings after watching an actor flying in a magic show. This kind of imitative behavior is in the nature of young children, but it's very dangerous. So we should give some sort of warning for children on TV programs.

I'm actually not sure that killing yourself so you can travel back in time and film an emperor (where do you get the camera?) is a tragedy that "happens in every era."...

Being not so sure about the impact of TV on suicides -- childish deaths from imitating superheroes, pro- wrestlers and such in the west aside -- and being slightly alert to conspiracies and coverups, I gotta say, this looks more like a cover-up of something else. There are lots of possibilities -- a spree of mass murder of children with or without child rape, a problem with some powerful "Big Bucks" in the local or regional Party-Wealthy Complex, drug-crazed People's Liberation Army veterans of the unpleasantness in Western China which dwarfs what we are seeing in Afghanistan or saw in Iraq -- but TV is a convenient scapegoat. Always has been and always will be...Dr. Who, in Mandarin drag, seducing the young with opium and time travel. 

My money is probably on some sort of Child 44 coverup  but who the hell knows about these things? Totalitarian countries are weirder than weird and China's internal dissension, cultural dissonance, and Commie-Confucian-Oligarchic messiness kind of makes it all seem possible, and that's funny in a weird way...and sad. 

Another possibility is that this is just some Politboro thug having a shit fit at time travel TV. Again, the oddities of totalitarianism...

 

 

Love is a bar band in Boston or Austin

Ok. Crusader AXE here. I guess the incredible, inscrutable, incomparable one either wanted me to occasionally put something here for the erudite masses, or he just forgot he gave me permission many years ago. Regardless, I'm glad he did. He gets a better class of reader here than we do at the Defeatists, most of whom appear to be robots. 

 

Today's topic is love and Valentine's Day. I speak as a bloodied veteran here on several fronts.

So, in the proper spirit of the thing.  Ok. Yesterday was our 36th anniversary. We are very fond of each other and have a reasonably complex financial life that would make disengaging difficult. We don't want to cause the other pain or even inconvenience. I rate this as a successful marriage. We don't hate each other, wish the other grevious harm, and try not to act contrary to our mutual best interests. 

That said, we got married on Friday the 13th. My thought, being a strategic thinker, was that this way I would not forget both Valentine's day or the Anniversary and hopefully, one would key my brain as to the other. Generally has worked...I see the Valentine's bullshit in the stores, and it triggers the response that I need to do something to commemorate the day so as not to violate the "first, do no harm or cause unnecessary pain" part of my ethic. It does not make me happy. This makes me happy... 

I hate Valentine's Day. It is part of the conspiracy of the consumer society that begins in pre-school to make us all ready for a life of disappointment and conspicuous consumption. 

animals as commodities

hmmmm! san francisco is trying ban the sale of all animals, including, like, goldfish. what do y'all make of that?

obviously, an anarchist can't really endorse the legislative approach. but it would be interesting to think about more and more creatures and things as stuff that cannot be bought and sold. if a cultural consensus started moving that way, it would be an immensely dramatic change: you'd get to 'post-capitalism.' we're a long long way from treating animals that way, of course, and people have been buying and selling animals since the hebrew bible, or long before. it more or less seems to go with the concept of domestication, i suppose, or comes soon thereafter. it seems pretty central to the practice of having pets. but it could be and perhaps should be re-thought. 

one would like to think of the national park system, for example, as taking some land out of the possibility of ownership, or moving it into collective ownership. and to some extent these are not mere ideologies, even if in other respects state ownership is anything but collective ownership. but the national park system is actually a reasonably good anti-anti-statist example (something which, in my own head, i've found a little difficult to square with my position), and it comes at least with the notion that some plants (redwoods) or inanimate/animate ecosystems (the grand canyon, say, or the tetons) are beyond ownership. if we could cultivate this attitude, it would change our relation to the world.